Movie review: Twisty thriller ‘Midnighters’ entertains

Al Alexander More Content Now

Thursday

Mar 8, 2018 at 2:10 PMMar 8, 2018 at 2:59 PM

Tarantino and the Coens have little to fear from Julius and Alston Ramsay, but the brothers’ imitation of those avant-garde vanguards is meant as the sincerest form of flattery in their attention-grabbing debut “Midnighters.” What they lack in originality is compensated by a determination to entertain the pants off of you with an engaging creation best described as horror noir.

With a little imagination, you can interpret “Midnighters” as an allegorical representation of the current White House, with residents emptying out the cutlery and finding every which way to stab each other in the back. Let the blood flow where it may, and the last man — or woman — standing gets all the spoils. But unlike the gang in the West Wing, there won’t be anyone able to survive long enough to testify.

I raise the ire of politics with good reason because Alston Ramsay, the younger of the brothers, is fresh off a career as a speechwriter for the likes of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. So he’s written a lot about war and terror, and it seeps deep into his screenplay about two beautiful sisters, Lindsey (Alex Essoe) and Hannah (Perla Haney-Jardine, she of luxuriously curly locks), who haven’t chosen wisely in selecting the men in their lives.

Likewise, Alston’s brother, Julius, who handles the directing, is well versed in sibling rivalry, and there’s a whole lot of that in “Midnighters,” which doesn’t just pit wife against feckless husband and singleton against deceptive boyfriend, it also enjoyably goes for a little sister-on-sister shenanigans. And what better battlefield for the arguing, torture and murder to commence than a rundown, old Victorian nestled up against a Rhode Island lake?

It all begins on New Year’s Eve at a party thrown by Lindsey’s employers at the bank where she works as a loan officer. She’s liquored up, and so is her unemployed, “sit on his ass all day” husband, Jeff (Dylan McTee), a washed-up baseball pitcher who can’t shake having blown the lead in the bottom of the ninth at the College World Series. Natch, he’s tanked, too. He’s also a wee bit horny, slipping his hand up his wife’s thigh on the drunken-drive home. But just as he’s about to reach paradise, all hell breaks loose when he strikes a man in the road.

Panicked because of their inebriated state, they load the victim in the backseat and bring him home and leave him in the garage long enough for them to figure out how best to dispose of the body. Fans of Season 2 of TV’s “Fargo” (Produced by who else: The Coen brothers.) will instantly shout out, “rip off.” And they’d be right. The plagiarism continues when Lindsey’s sister discovers the hard way the corpse isn’t really dead — at least not yet. From there, “Midnighters” evolves from warped crime drama, to perversely comic horror picture fueled by the sudden appearance of a nosey detective played by a magnificent Ward Horton, dripping Denis Leary-type sarcasm from every word exiting his obstreperous mouth.

He’s the life of this killing party, and you can’t get enough of him as he toys with a bound-and-gagged Lindsey. But don’t count her out. Nor anyone else, as the balance of power in this New Year’s Day parade of verbal and physical mayhem constantly shifts between the four combatants. And the longer it goes on, the more your appreciation grows for Alston Ramsay’s gift for writing funny, clever dialogue. It’s what sets this otherwise routine story apart. And his actors know it, relishing every word of it.

The real sicko, though is Alston’s older brother, Julius. An Emmy winner for directing TV’s “The Walking Dead,” he is predictably a maestro of the gross-out, emptying his bags of bodily fluids and then tossing in a little seat-squirming nail on fingernail violence reminiscent of what befell poor E. Emmet Walsh in the Coen brothers’ debut, “Blood Simple.” But that’s where the comparisons to the four-time Oscar-winners end. The Ramsays still have a long way to go to match their Midwestern heroes, but the endlessly fun “Midnighters” is one helluva step in the right direction.

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